CJR's Guide to Online News Startups

Results

Organizations filtered by Illinois.

Jan 11, 2012 04:06 PM
Brown Line Media

An independently owned network of three sites reporting on Chicago's North Side
By Ian Fullerton
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — Though he writes a vast majority of the posts on his flagship news site, Center Square Journal, Mike Fourcher prefers the title of publisher over journalist. "That's an important distinction," he says. "I do employ journalists... but the person that runs a baseball bat company is not a carpenter." A native Chicagoan, Fourcher launched Center Square in early 2010, after...
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Jun 20, 2012 12:52 PM
Chicago Phoenix

Chicago LGBT media goes digital (and grows up)
By Ian Fullerton
CHICAGO, IL — Gay media in Chicago has struggled in its search for identity. In recent years, two of the city's most prominent LGBT publications, Gay Chicago Magazine and the Chicago Free Press, shut down after transitioning from the traditional "bar rag" format, with content centered on entertainment and sex culture, to a more issue-related news and features focus. Some observers speculated that revenue problems...
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Nov 14, 2011 12:34 PM
ChicagoTalks.org

Student-reported, university-based community news
By Ian Fullerton
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — Shortly after launching what is now ChicagoTalks.org in 2006, Barbara Iverson realized that the project's original vision of enlisting citizen journalists to cover neighborhood beats just wasn't materializing. Originally pitched as a "meta-placelog" that would cover news in all fifty of the city's wards, the site received its initial funding from the school and through a grant from the start-up...
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Mar 24, 2011 12:15 PM
CU-CitizenAccess

University-based reporting on poverty in central Illinois
By Kathy Gilsinan
URBANA, ILLINOIS — When Brant Houston moved to the Champaign-Urbana, Illinois area from Columbia, Missouri to assume the University of Illinois's Knight Chair in Journalism, he did what he had long encouraged students to do in the classes he taught on computer assisted reporting: he trawled through census data to get a sense of his community. The poverty rate immediately stuck out as far out of...
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Oct 31, 2011 11:33 AM
Evanston Now

A hyperlocal news site holds its own in a media-saturated Chicago suburb
By Ian Fullerton
EVANSTON, ILLINOIS — As a native Evanstonian, Bill Smith remembers a time when the small suburban municipality just north of Chicago had only one paper to its name, the weekly Evanston Review. "For the latter half of the century there had been a few start-ups, but those mostly failed," he says. Today, that field has expanded, thanks in part to Smith, who logs around sixty...
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Mar 24, 2011 03:38 PM
Gapers Block

Chicago's first city-wide news and culture blog
By Armin Rosen
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — Today, Gapers Block is a smartly designed Chicago blog with everything you'd expect to see on a web-specific and geographically focused publication: there's an events calendar, as well as tabs for food, arts, music, and politics. But if Gapers Block looks typical, that's only because of its own influence on the "city blog" genre. When it launched in 2003, Gapers Block...
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Nov 30, 2011 03:19 PM
GazeboNews

News and "stuff" for two affluent Chicago suburbs
By Justin Peters
LAKE BLUFF, ILLINOIS — When, in 2006, Adrienne Fawcett moved to Lake Bluff, Illinois, a leafy suburb thirty-five miles north of downtown Chicago, the local news scene was in repose. "I felt the people I was talking to in the community had a better sense of what was going on than the media covering the community," she remembers. At the time, the town of 5,722...
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Feb 24, 2012 12:54 PM
Patch (Illinois)

AOL's fast-growing hyperlocal network
By AJ Hudson
Illinois has one of the larger collections of Patch sites-fifty-nine in all. Not surprisingly, the sites are most prevalent in the Chicago suburbs. The state also includes two universities contributing to coverage through the "PatchU" program: Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and the Columbia College Chicago Journalism Department. Read CJR's full profile of the Patch network here. Patch has launched more than...
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Dec 29, 2010 04:40 PM
Pitchfork

The prolific online music reviewer/kingmaker
By Sean Gandert
CHICAGO, IL — Founded in 1995 as an Internet alternative to traditional music fanzines, Pitchfork has become a force within the music industry every bit as vital as Rolling Stone or Spin. While somewhat controversial due to its highly opinionated reviews, Pitchfork has a reputation for being able to spot new talent and bring them to a much wider audience. Bands such...
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Jan 3, 2011 05:17 PM
PopMatters

Pop culture criticism with an academic bent
By Sean Gandert
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — Back when the Internet was still the sole purview of academics and nerds, journalist Sarah Zupko, then working in marketing at Tribune Media Services, founded a site catering to those specific audiences. That site was not in fact PopMatters, but it was a progenitor of sorts, providing web links for researchers studying pop culture. During the years that followed, Zupko's interests...
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Oct 11, 2011 10:00 AM
Progress Illinois

A labor-backed site providing original news and analysis beyond the mainstream
By Nicolas Zimmerman
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — While the genesis of Progress Illinois dates back to 2006, the left-leaning news and commentary site officially launched in March 2008, riding a wave of national interest in Illinois politics propelled by then-senator Barack Obama's unlikely bid for the presidency. The spotlight on Illinois intensified further that year with ex-governor Rod Blagojevich's descent from up-and-coming progressive politician to perpetual punch...
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May 26, 2011 01:28 PM
The Beachwood Reporter

A belligerently informed take on Chicago media, sports, and culture
By Armin Rosen
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — In 2006, after fifteen years as a print journalist, including six years as a political reporter with Chicago Magazine, Steve Rhodes took the biggest gamble of his career. Frustrated with what he viewed as the magazine's obliviousness towards the Internet, he quit his job and threw all of his financial and journalistic resources behind his own online magazine, The Beachwood Reporter....
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Jan 5, 2011 08:37 PM
The Chicago News Cooperative

Newspaper-style journalism for the Chicagoland area
By Alex Fekula
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — [UPDATE: On February 20, 2012, Chicago News Cooperative editor and CEO James O'Shea announced that CNC was suspending its website, as well as its contributions to The New York Times, in order to " reassess our operations and determine if there is a more sustainable path to the future."] The Chicago News Cooperative was famously the first outside news organization...
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Feb 22, 2012 01:38 PM
Welles Park Bulldog

News and sports for Chicago's North Side
By Ian Fullerton
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — The Welles Park Bulldog takes its name from a picturesque public park in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood, and delivers insight and opinion on politics, culture, and sports for a dense stretch of residential and mixed-use boroughs on Chicago's North Side. The site's founder and publisher, Patrick Boylan, first had the idea that would eventually become the Bulldog in 2009. "I had...
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